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Neighbour says I hit their car
Hi all, I've got a bit of an issue and was wondering if I could get some advice from you happy people.
I've been ill for the last few days with mild flu. Because of that, I haven't driven my car since I got home last Thursday night (in fact I've only left the house twice - once to look after my disable Grandfather on Sunday, and then yesterday evening when I thought I was feeling better (turns out wrong) so we had a family meal out to "celebrate" my mother's 26th anniversary in her job).
This morning, my father went out to the cars and found a note on mine that just said "please contact me urgently" along with a name an phone number. I called the number and it turned out to be my neighbour from a few doors down's daughter.
She told me that I'd hit her car and damaged it. I asked her when and she said "last Thursday or Friday afternoon". As a timeline, this doesn't stack up. From Wednesday afternoon until 6:30 on Thursday evening, I was parked outside my neighbours on the other side, a good hundred yards from where her mother lives. I went out at 6:30 and came back at 10:30 and parked behind another neighbour who we know (and as I know that some of our neighbours are terrible at leaving enough space between cars, I tend to give her a slightly wider than average gap so that she can get out in the morning).
Now, something worth noting here is that I don't parallel park. I know how, but because of a road accident a few years ago, I find it quite hard to do because of how I have to move my neck to guide the car. As such, I only really park in spaces I can drive directly into (I've been known to park in adjacent roads rather than mess about trying to parallel park because it makes my neck and shoulder hurt for days).
My car does have some damage on it from when I was in my last job. The office was at the end of a car park with 2 4-storey office buildings. Around September last year, they started converting one of them ito houses, which obviously meant a lot of building activity. During that, the front bumper had some quite deep gouges taken out of it which went right through the silver and down to the black. We took photos at the time as we hoped to prove the builders did it, but were never able to. A few months later, one of the builder's vans managed to scuff down the back corner of the bumper and leave a nice block of red paint at the end of the scuff. Again, we took pictures at the time and still have them, including the metadata showing when they were taken (unfortunately, iphones don't stamp it onto the actual photo). In fact, the original photos are still on my mother's mobile as she doesn't clear out her photo storage on it, she just goes through, deletes specific images, and leaves the rest there "in case she ever needs them".
Of course, this woman's car is red. She noticed some damage on her car on Saturday, came around to her mother's yesterday, saw my car and decided it absolutely must have been me who did it on Thursday (when my car was at the other end of the road) or Friday (its Wednesday today, the car hasn't moved since Thursday and today was the first time I've even unlocked it since then.
I've told her I have the photos showing that the damage is old, but she won't accept it. She's now talking about getting paint experts round to match the paint from my car to hers, and vice versa (apparently her car has "silver paint all over it" and its too convenient to be anyone else's). She also apparently has people going through CCTV (I don't know what CCTV as there's no public camera in the area and as far as I'm aware, you're not allowed to use CCTV to records incidents on other people's land or public land like roads and paths) to "narrow down when it happened".
The really funny thing is that when she was challenged "well how do we know you didn't hit his car?" her response was "because if it was, I'd have left a note". Apparently when she says it, its an ironclad reason, not to be questioned. But the fact is that if I'd hit the car, my father knows her mother and would have instantly told me who owned it, at which point I'd have gone straight round, knocked at the door, apologised and given insurance details to make it right. When I say that though, she dismisses it as "well you clearly didn't, did you?", even though her note statement is apparently unchallengeable.
I've told her that I'm not paying out personally and to go through insurance, but I'm worried that I'll end up liable for her car, which I wouldn't realsitically be able to afford, as I haven't worked since March while I recover from major depressive disorder, so funds are tight.
Realistically, how is this likely to turn out? I know I didn't hit her, absolutely 100%, no doubt in my mind, and the photos of the damage to my car are identical today to what they were when they were taken six months/a year ago, but with the depression, I find this kind of thing really daunting and stressful.
Edit: Its probably worth noting that while we're not particularly close with this neighbour, there's no animosity either. Her daughter can be quite aggravating though. There are 3 disabled bays on our road. One was put in for my father, one for our 93-year-old neighbour's daughter (she was involved in a bad RTC a few years ago, so genuinely needs it), and one for this woman's mother. When the daughter comes to visit, she will almost always park in my father's bay (I know they're really for anyone, but just to give an idea of where), despite not having a blue badge to allow her to park in it. It has caused some tension before when my father has had to ask her to move her car into one of the dozen or so other, non-disabled spots on the road so that he can actually park outside our house in the disabled bay he's entitled to. She usually does it, but she makes a big thing of it, asking why my 69 year old father with chronic asthma and arthritis in basically every joint below the waist (bear in mind she's 25 and seems far more spritely than I was at that age) can't park up the road in one of the empty spaces,
Its kind of embarrassing to say as a 30 year old, but I've actually asked my mother to act as somewhat of a gobetween for this, as the depression tends to make me get quite stressed and emotional when things like this happen (particularly when she's trying to trip me up mid sentence - I said that the damage with the red paint was a year old, then later commented on the black damage on the front being 6 months old, she immediately jumped in going "YOU TOLD ME IT WAS ALL A YEAR AGO, NOW YOU'RE SAYING SIX MONTHS"). Apparently my mother says that she isn't being too bad, but when she spoke to me, I found her quite confrontational and insistant that it was only me that could have done it (it would seem I have the only sillver car in the south east... other than the 5 other silver cars regularly parked on our street).
I've been ill for the last few days with mild flu. Because of that, I haven't driven my car since I got home last Thursday night (in fact I've only left the house twice - once to look after my disable Grandfather on Sunday, and then yesterday evening when I thought I was feeling better (turns out wrong) so we had a family meal out to "celebrate" my mother's 26th anniversary in her job).
This morning, my father went out to the cars and found a note on mine that just said "please contact me urgently" along with a name an phone number. I called the number and it turned out to be my neighbour from a few doors down's daughter.
She told me that I'd hit her car and damaged it. I asked her when and she said "last Thursday or Friday afternoon". As a timeline, this doesn't stack up. From Wednesday afternoon until 6:30 on Thursday evening, I was parked outside my neighbours on the other side, a good hundred yards from where her mother lives. I went out at 6:30 and came back at 10:30 and parked behind another neighbour who we know (and as I know that some of our neighbours are terrible at leaving enough space between cars, I tend to give her a slightly wider than average gap so that she can get out in the morning).
Now, something worth noting here is that I don't parallel park. I know how, but because of a road accident a few years ago, I find it quite hard to do because of how I have to move my neck to guide the car. As such, I only really park in spaces I can drive directly into (I've been known to park in adjacent roads rather than mess about trying to parallel park because it makes my neck and shoulder hurt for days).
My car does have some damage on it from when I was in my last job. The office was at the end of a car park with 2 4-storey office buildings. Around September last year, they started converting one of them ito houses, which obviously meant a lot of building activity. During that, the front bumper had some quite deep gouges taken out of it which went right through the silver and down to the black. We took photos at the time as we hoped to prove the builders did it, but were never able to. A few months later, one of the builder's vans managed to scuff down the back corner of the bumper and leave a nice block of red paint at the end of the scuff. Again, we took pictures at the time and still have them, including the metadata showing when they were taken (unfortunately, iphones don't stamp it onto the actual photo). In fact, the original photos are still on my mother's mobile as she doesn't clear out her photo storage on it, she just goes through, deletes specific images, and leaves the rest there "in case she ever needs them".
Of course, this woman's car is red. She noticed some damage on her car on Saturday, came around to her mother's yesterday, saw my car and decided it absolutely must have been me who did it on Thursday (when my car was at the other end of the road) or Friday (its Wednesday today, the car hasn't moved since Thursday and today was the first time I've even unlocked it since then.
I've told her I have the photos showing that the damage is old, but she won't accept it. She's now talking about getting paint experts round to match the paint from my car to hers, and vice versa (apparently her car has "silver paint all over it" and its too convenient to be anyone else's). She also apparently has people going through CCTV (I don't know what CCTV as there's no public camera in the area and as far as I'm aware, you're not allowed to use CCTV to records incidents on other people's land or public land like roads and paths) to "narrow down when it happened".
The really funny thing is that when she was challenged "well how do we know you didn't hit his car?" her response was "because if it was, I'd have left a note". Apparently when she says it, its an ironclad reason, not to be questioned. But the fact is that if I'd hit the car, my father knows her mother and would have instantly told me who owned it, at which point I'd have gone straight round, knocked at the door, apologised and given insurance details to make it right. When I say that though, she dismisses it as "well you clearly didn't, did you?", even though her note statement is apparently unchallengeable.
I've told her that I'm not paying out personally and to go through insurance, but I'm worried that I'll end up liable for her car, which I wouldn't realsitically be able to afford, as I haven't worked since March while I recover from major depressive disorder, so funds are tight.
Realistically, how is this likely to turn out? I know I didn't hit her, absolutely 100%, no doubt in my mind, and the photos of the damage to my car are identical today to what they were when they were taken six months/a year ago, but with the depression, I find this kind of thing really daunting and stressful.
Edit: Its probably worth noting that while we're not particularly close with this neighbour, there's no animosity either. Her daughter can be quite aggravating though. There are 3 disabled bays on our road. One was put in for my father, one for our 93-year-old neighbour's daughter (she was involved in a bad RTC a few years ago, so genuinely needs it), and one for this woman's mother. When the daughter comes to visit, she will almost always park in my father's bay (I know they're really for anyone, but just to give an idea of where), despite not having a blue badge to allow her to park in it. It has caused some tension before when my father has had to ask her to move her car into one of the dozen or so other, non-disabled spots on the road so that he can actually park outside our house in the disabled bay he's entitled to. She usually does it, but she makes a big thing of it, asking why my 69 year old father with chronic asthma and arthritis in basically every joint below the waist (bear in mind she's 25 and seems far more spritely than I was at that age) can't park up the road in one of the empty spaces,
Its kind of embarrassing to say as a 30 year old, but I've actually asked my mother to act as somewhat of a gobetween for this, as the depression tends to make me get quite stressed and emotional when things like this happen (particularly when she's trying to trip me up mid sentence - I said that the damage with the red paint was a year old, then later commented on the black damage on the front being 6 months old, she immediately jumped in going "YOU TOLD ME IT WAS ALL A YEAR AGO, NOW YOU'RE SAYING SIX MONTHS"). Apparently my mother says that she isn't being too bad, but when she spoke to me, I found her quite confrontational and insistant that it was only me that could have done it (it would seem I have the only sillver car in the south east... other than the 5 other silver cars regularly parked on our street).
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Comments
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If your adamant that you didn't cause the damage and can back this up then you have nothing to worry about. It's up to your neighbour to prove otherwise. I'd just ignore her and see what happens.0
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If your adamant that you didn't cause the damage and can back this up then you have nothing to worry about. It's up to your neighbour to prove otherwise. I'd just ignore her and see what happens.
Thanks, that's what my instinct is telling me.
I guess my view of the insurance companies is a bit tainted as a few years ago, someone ran into my cousin's car as she was coming out of a side turning (she was edging out slowly as there was an 8 foot hedge blocking the view). He hit the front passenger side roughly where the wheel is so hard that the axle bent and the wheel ended up egged shaped (of course, the car was a write off).
Yet he told the insurance company he was going at 20 to 25 mph (I've never heard of a collsion at 20 bending the axle and warping the wheel like that - I got hit by a full sized ambulance at 20 while I was waiting to cross a road and I was out of hospital in 18 hours) and without even talking to my cousin, they accepted it and paid out to him, then hiked my cousins renewal to something like 4 grand. The logic - my cousin was a new driver, so of course she was at fault.0 -
As above. Unless the neighbour has evidence to prove you caused the damage, it will go nowhere.0
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Going off topic, but don't let that cloud your view of insurance companies. From your description, your cousin was at fault because she was entering the main carriageway from a side road and didn't have priority. Nothing to do with her being a new driver, she was at fault, period. And yes, a car travelling at 25mph can easily bend an axle and warp a wheel because it will be carrying a lot of energy even at that relatively low speed and it hit a pretty immovable object that would deform to absorb that energy. It's a totally different physical collision than you (a relatively floppy human) versus an ambulance.Thanks, that's what my instinct is telling me.
I guess my view of the insurance companies is a bit tainted as a few years ago, someone ran into my cousin's car as she was coming out of a side turning (she was edging out slowly as there was an 8 foot hedge blocking the view). He hit the front passenger side roughly where the wheel is so hard that the axle bent and the wheel ended up egged shaped (of course, the car was a write off).
Yet he told the insurance company he was going at 20 to 25 mph (I've never heard of a collsion at 20 bending the axle and warping the wheel like that - I got hit by a full sized ambulance at 20 while I was waiting to cross a road and I was out of hospital in 18 hours) and without even talking to my cousin, they accepted it and paid out to him, then hiked my cousins renewal to something like 4 grand. The logic - my cousin was a new driver, so of course she was at fault.
Yours is an entirely different insurance situation. In fact, it isn't even yours, it's your neighbour's. At this stage, you have as much involvement in it as I do! Insurers won't start paying out on the say-so of a neighbour without a shred of evidence.0 -
Aylesbury_Duck wrote: »Going off topic, but don't let that cloud your view of insurance companies. From your description, your cousin was at fault because she was entering the main carriageway from a side road and didn't have priority. Nothing to do with her being a new driver, she was at fault, period. And yes, a car travelling at 25mph can easily bend an axle and warp a wheel because it will be carrying a lot of energy even at that relatively low speed and it hit a pretty immovable object that would deform to absorb that energy. It's a totally different physical collision than you (a relatively floppy human) versus an ambulance.
Yours is an entirely different insurance situation. In fact, it isn't even yours, it's your neighbour's. At this stage, you have as much involvement in it as I do! Insurers won't start paying out on the say-so of a neighbour without a shred of evidence.
I'm not so much letting it taint it because they paid, out, but because of the way they handled the claim. She literally got told "someone's made a claim against you", then two weeks later she got told "we've found against you and paid out". Literally didn't ask her side of the story at all, which is what is worrying me here - that they'll pay out based on her photos (after all, her car is red, my car has a red mark on it) without actually speaking to me.0 -
Again, two very different scenarios. Your cousin was involved in a very obvious collision and presumably volunteered her insurance details and acknowledged she was involved in the crash. Without independent witnesses to say that the other driver was doing something wrong, it was always going to be cut-and-dried that she was at fault because the other driver was on the main road and she emerged into his path.I'm not so much letting it taint it because they paid, out, but because of the way they handled the claim. She literally got told "someone's made a claim against you", then two weeks later she got told "we've found against you and paid out". Literally didn't ask her side of the story at all, which is what is worrying me here - that they'll pay out based on her photos (after all, her car is red, my car has a red mark on it) without actually speaking to me.
In your situation, you were't involved in the accident, haven't acknowledged any involvement in the accident and there are no independent witnesses to say you were involved. A red mark on your car is not proof of your involvement, it doesn't even suggest you were involved. What's to say that red mark wasn't deposited when your neighbour scuffed your car trying to park hers? If you drive around the local area you'll probably find red scuffs on all sorts of cars and street furniture - does that mean your neighbour has been driving around hitting them?
Relax. Nothing is going to happen. She knows it.0 -
You can record anything you like, anywhere. But it's largely irrelevant if you weren't involved!0
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You can record anything you like, anywhere. But it's largely irrelevant if you weren't involved!
I thought that if you were recording outside your own property, you were supposed to black it out or something (or am I thinking of some old, outdated thing?). I definitely recall the police telling my mother something to that effect when someone was systematically vandalizing her car, though that was like 15 years ago.0 -
I thought that if you were recording outside your own property, you were supposed to black it out or something (or am I thinking of some old, outdated thing?). I definitely recall the police telling my mother something to that effect when someone was systematically vandalizing her car, though that was like 15 years ago.
I won't worry about the legalities of cctv that won't show you hitting her car. But on the other hand why are you against something that'll prove you didn't?0 -
AndyMc..... wrote: »I won't worry about the legalities of cctv that won't show you hitting her car. But on the other hand why are you against something that'll prove you didn't?
TBH, it's more a tangent than directly relevant. We talked about getting our own CCTV years ago when the car was getting vandalized, but we didn't when we were told we couldn't use it to film the road and public footpath. Was more that her bringing it up brought up the question as to whether that had changed. As far as I'm concerned, she can check all the CCTV she likes for this.0
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